How dare he? Leonardo DiCaprio comes to Australia to make movies and make out. He is not supposed to make criticism.

We are a friendly folk who like other people to be friendly and who prefer our celebrities saccharine sweet. And after years of welcoming strangers to our shores, our expectations of celebrities are simple: we want them to love Australia, think the animals are cute, and one day hope to move here.

In the worst slight since Frank Sinatra attacked our women journalists in 1974, the American actor's implied critique of Australia's guardianship of the Great Barrier Reef was one of the big moments at this week's Our Ocean Conference in Washington DC.

''Since my very first dive in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia 20 years ago, to the dive I got to do in the very same location just two years ago, I've witnessed environmental devastation firsthand,'' DiCaprio said. ''What once had looked like an endless underwater utopia is now riddled with bleached coral reefs and massive dead zones.''

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He also pledged grants of $7.45 million from his private foundation to ocean conservation efforts.

DiCaprio had barely finished when the World Heritage meeting in Doha chimed in: firstly, giving Australia another year to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being put on a list of protected sites considered ''in danger'' and, secondly, delivering an international dressing down for a recent approval of dredging and dumping in the natural wonder's waters.

Australia has often shouldered the burden of being on the nose internationally but DiCaprio's words bestow a kind of instantaneous shame that lingers, thanks to social media and the internet.

Celebrity gushing started when the old sailing and steam ships arrived in Fremantle bearing cargoes of superannuated performers and continued when the Boeing 707 made Mascot the first point of arrival.

Everybody from Apple founder Steve Wozniak to Ellen DeGeneres, Pink, George Michael, Gordon Ramsay and Robbie Williams have said they would like to move to Australia. But only Leo Sayer, Ben Folds, Toni Childs and writer Ben Elton made good on their words.

Curiously perhaps, Australia's most famous celebrity put down did not take place. The actress Ava Gardner, in Melbourne to star in On The Beach, the 1959 film based on Nevil Shute's nuclear apocalyptic book, allegedly made a disparaging remark about the city by the Yarra.

A Herald reporter was to blame. Neil Jillett was on an interstate posting to Melbourne and ordered to write a piece on the actress for The Sun-Herald. But she was not giving interviews.

Jillett told the Herald this week: ''I ended my story, 'It has not yet been confirmed that Miss Gardner, as has been rumoured at third hand from a usually unreliable source, if given the chance, would seriously consider whether, if she managed to think of it, she would like to have put on record that she said, ''On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.'' '

''I was then a very wordy young smart aleck and assumed the subs in Sydney would get my joke. They didn't. They cut my paragraph and kept the quote.''

Now a Melburnian, Jillett's cruel words on his adopted city continue to echo down the years.